Who Would Have Thunk It?

Hole 6 Is A Hole-in-one Charm For 4 At U.s. Open

June 17, 1989|By DAVID TEEL Staff Writer

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — If you truly believe Ed McMahon is going to award you $10 million, or if you expect Wayne Newton to be the opening act on The Who's current tour, then this won't surprise you. Otherwise ...

Four players - Doug Weaver, Mark Wiebe, Jerry Pate and Nick Price - made holes-in-one during Friday's second round of the United States Open at Oak Hill Country Club. All on the 169-yard 6th hole. All with 7-irons.

Not impressed? These are pros, you say? Consider: Early Open records are incomplete, but only 16 previous aces had been scored at the Open since 1936, the last by Ben Crenshaw in 1985.

As word of the aces spread across Oak Hill, spectators flocked to the sixth green. Golf Digest issued a press release that claimed the odds of four pros acing the same hole on the same day were 332,000-1.

The National Hole-in-one Association countered that the odds are 8.7 million-1 and said that four holes-in-one on the same hole in the same round should not happen again for 190 years.

"I've played a lot of major championships," Price said. "This is the strangest thing I've ever seen."

Especially considering the timing. The four aces occurred within two hours Friday. Weaver, a PGA Tour rookie who has missed the cut in eight of his 11 tournaments, teed off in the first group at 7 a.m., and recorded his ace about 8:15.

Wiebe was the 24th player to hit off the 6th tee, Pate the 29th, Price the 32nd. The last three holes-in-one came within nine golfers.

"The first day the crowds came with the good players and left," said 6th hole marshal Lars Hjalmquist. "Today, the crowd just stayed."

The USGA gathered the four players for a photo and announced that the golf balls used will be displayed at the Golf House museum in Far Hills, N.J.

Some play-by-play, courtesy of the perpetrators:

Weaver: "It was realy early and nobody else was out there. It was real quiet. I'd guestimate about 200 people in the stands. I hit it about 10 feet past and knew it would roll down to the left. It was a beautiful few moments watching it roll into the hole. When the crowd saw it go in, it was like lightning hit."

Wiebe, the 1985 Anheuser-Busch champion: "It hit long and spun back. All of a sudden it disappeared and the crowd went bananas."

Pate, the 1976 Open champion: "We were walking down the 4th hole and heard Mark's. ... I took a 7-iron and hit it hard, about a foot right and eight feet past. The first person I heard scream was my wife. ... It was a real thrill, like walking up 18 when you're winning the Open."

Price, the 1983 World Series of Golf winner: "After I pulled the club, the marshal got a hold of my caddie and said, `The secret of playing this hole is you have to hit it down the right side and it will suck back down.' As he said that, I hit my shot, and my caddie said, `That's it. That's the way to do it.' So it was really weird."

The aces are Weaver's sixth, Wiebe's third, Pate's eighth and Price's third. The odds of a Tour player scoring a hole-in-one during a given round are 927-1, according to Golf Digest. The odds skyrocket to 8,404-1 for the hackers among us.

All four conceded that Oak Hill's greens, softened by rain earlier this week, shortened those odds.

"There won't be any more," said John Morris of the USGA. "We just planted a tree there."